The cap on all damages from a single rail accident goes to $401.9m, and the price index the formula asked for did not exist

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 4, 2026

Photo: Engin Akyurt / Pexels

What it changes

This is one number for one accident, not a number per passenger. The cap covers the aggregate of all awards to all rail passengers, against all defendants, for all claims arising from a single incident, and the statute counts punitive damages inside it rather than outside. It rises to $401,900,000 thirty days after the notice is published, and the notice carries a publication date of 5 August, so an incident before that date sits under the old figure of $322,864,228. If you write or price this risk, note where the number comes from: it is not a judgement about railway safety or about award sizes, it is the 1997 cap of $200m carried forward on the consumer price index, and the statute fixes the review at every fifth year rather than annually. The gap between reviews is why a single missing month in the price series matters at all.

$401,900,000.

That is the new ceiling on everything a single rail accident can cost in damages, under a notice the Office of the Secretary of Transportation filed at 08.45 Eastern on Tuesday. The old figure was $322,864,228. The increase is about 24.5 percent, and it takes effect 30 days after the notice publishes, which the document sets for 5 August.

The cap is not a limit per passenger. Section 28103 of title 49 caps the aggregate of all awards to all rail passengers, against all defendants, for all claims arising from one accident or incident, and it counts punitive damages inside that total.

The number is a price index, not a judgement

Congress set the cap at $200m with effect from 2 December 1997 and, in section 11415 of the 2015 surface transportation act, told the Secretary to carry it forward on the consumer price index every fifth year. The Federal Railroad Administration's economics office does that with two readings. December 1997 stands at 161.300. The reading it divides by that is 324.122, and the quotient multiplied by the original $200m rounds to the published figure.

Nothing in the calculation looks at railways at all.

The reading it used is not the one the formula wanted

The second index value in that table is November 2025, and a footnote explains why. October 2025 data were unavailable because of the lapse in appropriations, so November was used instead.

That is a small substitution with an odd property. A price index that is published monthly and read once every five years cannot tolerate a gap, because there is no next month to fall back on inside the same window, and the missing month becomes permanent in the multiplier it produced. Whether October would have given a materially different answer is not something the notice addresses, and this brief does not guess.

The contact of record is Swati Patel, at the Federal Railroad Administration's economics office. Sean P. Duffy, the Secretary, issued it.

The cap on all damages from a single rail accident goes to $401.9m, and the price index the formula asked for did not exist

The number is a price index, not a judgement

The reading it used is not the one the formula wanted

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